Historically, the only way to get an Amazon Prime subscription was to pay one $79 per year fee. However, Amazon is now offering a monthly Prime subscription at $7.99 per month. To get people to try out Prime, Amazon is even offering up a free one-month trial of the service. After that one-month trial, the Prime membership will cost $7.99 per month.

Perhaps the best thing about the monthly service is that there is no minimum order size to get free two-day shipping on millions of items. The real and often overlooked benefit of Prime is the dirt-cheap next-day shipping. For somewhere around three dollars, you can get your items the next day.

Monthly prime subscribers also get unlimited instant streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Instant Video and a free Kindle digital book each month from the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Amazon is obviously getting very serious about its streaming video offering with the monthly price of $7.99. It's on par with Netflix and Hulu Plus, with one major benefit over both of those services of having free shipping on all sorts of products sold by Amazon and a free digital book each month.